Living the expat life as I do, there are inevitably times when I begin to doubt my Americanness. Usually this happens when I find the latest U.S. celebrity gossip or pop culture reference sailing over my head, and definitely when I confess to fellow Americans that I actually don’t like peanut butter all that much. This identity crisis doesn’t particularly distress me, I have to admit, and I even find myself concocting fantasies about how my character has evolved into some kind of sophisticated pan-national cocktail of all the places I’ve lived. These nation-free delusions have even enjoyed occasional reinforcement from others, such as the time I was buying a bus ticket in New Zealand and the girl behind the counter confessed at the end of our transaction that she had been trying to place my accent but couldn’t get beyond ‘somewhere European’, or the time my own mother told me my speech had become so regionally ambiguous she would assume I was a non-native speaker of English if she didn’t know me. Aww, thanks mom.